Sunday, October 17, 2010

Coming to a theater near you. . ..

yesterday my wife and I drove/subwayed to Cambridge to see, orioginally, three movies. We wound up seeing only two, but they were in their way blockbusters, both documentaries: Waiting for Superman and Inside Job.

Waiting for Superman is about the collapse of American education and the charter school movement, towards which it is very favorable--perhaps too favorable. As my son, a charter middle school principal in Brooklyn, will tell you, charters remain an experiment, trying different recipes with different results, although some have indeed had amazing success. The film paid a good deal of attention to Michelle Rhee, the Gen X Superintendent of the Washington, D. C. schools, who tried to get the teachers' union to give up tenure in return for promising to double the salaries of effective teachers. They wouldn't do it. The movie appeared too early to report that Ms. Rhee is now the ex-superintendent as a result of the defeat of the mayor who was her patron. The movie did show, as my son has told me, what a horrible, painful process the lotteries to get into charters are--the vast majority of parents whose kids don't make it feel their kids have lost their only chance at a better life. And they are probably right.

Inside Job is even better and even more depressing, tracing the origins of the financial crisis, and the response to it, in devastating terms. It features long interviews both with ex-high officials, a few investment bankers, a few (almost invariably older) economists who had gotten it for a long time and saw the crash coming, and a lot of totally syncophantic economists. I did not realize, and thank the filmmaker for pointing it out, that the economists in our leading universities have been bought off by consultancies with hedge funds and banks. One of them has to explain, quite unashamedly, how he took $100,000 or so a few years ago to co-author a paper praising the Icelandic banking system. It is clear that everyone in the system is too drunk on money to think that anything could be wrong with it. There is now, of course, a revolving door between the top positions in Washington and the megabanks. Above all, the film shows how utterly naive--ridiculous, really--it was for people like me to think the Obama Administration would do anything meaningful. Re-appointing Bernanke was equivalent to keeping Admiral Kimmel in command of the US Fleet after Pearl Harbor. Larry Summers and Tim Geithner were also, of course, totally, deeply implicated in everything that had gone wrong. I feel fairly sure that within five years we will have another crash. The dreadful effects of allowing huge fortunes to accumulate was never more apparent. There are interviews with a few Europeans, particularly the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, who really stand out. They are grown-ups. The Americans are not. And the list of people who refused to be interviewed is very long.

In short, we saw two things: the failure of US education to help the poor (and increasingly, the middle class), and the devastation that the most highly educated sectors of our society have wrought. I did not emerge any more optimistic about the future. It is simply not clear where meaningful change could come from anytime soon.

Regular readers note: there was another new post yesterday.__________________

Sir,Why the gratuitous slur against Admiral Kimmel? If you would care to know the true reasons for the success of the Pearl Harbor attack, I would be most pleased to assist you. A good place to start would be my website:http://www.pearlharbor911attacks.com.Regards,Tom Kimmel

David, Here in New Zealand the business of buying up the experts and particularly those in academia is a well used tactic . Recently when a large state connected energy company wanted to ramrod a new hydro-electric project through the people in opposition found it very difficult to gain access to any qualified experts that were not already compromised by the energy company. Alohamac

b. Run, do not walk, to see Waiting for Superman, the movie about the crisis in education, andteaching standards, in this country. Forget whatside of the fence you are on regarding unions, eventhough this movie indicts the system that makes itvirtually impossible to fire bad unionized teachers and to reward great unionized ones. As in any walkof life, there are good teachers and bad ones. Justwatch the movie to discover how sick our public education system is, and how the lack of standardsis setting back kids nationwide every year.Watching kids fail to get one of the very few spotsin proven charter schools, then having to trudgeback to underperforming neighborhood publicschools, is heartbreaking. The saddest part, to me,was seeing a school administrator with a solid planto fix the Washington, D.C., academic standards,Michelle Rhee, get shouted down at every turn(she ended up resigning last week) and reach theunavoidable conclusion that in too many city schoolsystems, it's more about adults keeping their jobsthan it is about kids learning from them.

Many thanks for the great discussion of the media treatments of the financial crisis and the education crisis.

Americans, as well as most other modern denizens, have long been trained, and educated, to see these things, realms,

not as somehow connected to each other and to a political philosophical economic, etc., 'system', call it what you will,

but as academically and empirically isolable areas, suitable for isolated 'treatments', by specialists, of education (local school boards in the US case), or finance, or economics.

There was a time when they were more closely seen as integrated in a nation state commonwealth concept, associated not only with welfare and enrichment of the average citizen, but also with notions of national security;

universal education was at one time more closely associated with a cold war mentality, it had certain negative propaganda implications, but countervailing universalism of opportunity and funding, even though subject to wide discrimination in practice.

About Me

Since 1976 I have been a historian of international and domestic politics, as well as an authority on some of the more famous criminal cases in American history. For the past eight years I have been using this space to comment on current events. Links to my books, including, The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2008), appear above, at the top right corner of this page.. Simply click to learn more about them or to order them.
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